Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday May 23, 2014 @02:09PM
from the digital-walmart dept.

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the NY Times:
"Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle. The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling's new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as 'unavailable.' In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel, The Girls of August, coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist. Amazon is also flexing its muscles in Germany, delaying deliveries of books issued by Bonnier, a major publisher."

It doesn't always show the paywall, they've put in a few workarounds here and there so that people following links get the content. It's just more dishonesty in their attempts to monetize a website.
They also seem to send daily ads out pressuring you to get a subscription to their website, if you've given them your e-mail.
I wish content providers trying to sell their content would focus on their content instead of the money. Else what the heck are you selling?

I don't necessarily see that putting in workarounds that allow a few pageviews a month for a non-paying user as being dishonest - it's advertising. 'If you like these articles, we have more that you would need to pay for' - and they usually tell you exactly that when you hit the free limit.

Of selling books, often below their cost, and providing a secure system(Kindle DRM) for authors to sell e books. While there is certainly a downward pressure on the price of books due to Amazon, the reality is that authors probably sell a hell of lot more books because of Amazon. I do not see how a publisher can complain. After all, if Amazon is not providing a service, they are free to sell physical books through Barnes and Noble, for instance, as well as sell unencumbered e-books through any number of online sources. They can digitally mark each e-book for each customer, and litigate those that resell or otherwise pirate.

I happily go to O'Reilly and pay $40 for a physical and unencumbered PDF copy of a book. What publishers aren't doing is moving with market forces. The value of book is not what it used to be. The average American is not making what was the previous expectation. We are in a deflationary period. Amazon is under pressure to show a better return on investment. They do not have to sell products when the supplier wants excessive value. It is like a restaurant not selling Coca Cola products. SOme don't because Pepsi cuts a better deal.

You purchase windows to install on your computer, but you don't purchase amazon, so its a little different. It would be more like Walmart not selling your product because you don't agree to their rock bottom pricing they want to force on you. Which is also an issue.

This analogy misses out on a key piece of what Amazon is doing. A more accurate analogy along similar lines would be a restaurant advertising Coca Cola and then offering customers that finally came in a Pepsi right now, or a Coca Cola in an inordinately long amount of time later.
I don't know what amount of searches start at Amazon or book PLAs point to Amazon but I would bet it is pretty high which makes this behaviour all the more repulsive to me.

Software is a MUCH better analogy than soft drinks. Pepsi and Coke are really interchangeable except for personal preference. Software or books are not interchangeable because different pieces of software have different features, and different books contain different information.

Lousy analogy. Microsoft makes Word and Word competed against Wordperfect so one would not expect the manufacturer of one product to sell the competing product of a competitor. Amazon sells books. It does not write them or publish them. It is an important channel through which publishers and authors seek to sell their products. The books are electronic so the cost of stocking and selling any one book is close to zero. Amazon is simply refusing to sell certain books in order to put price pressure on a

This is not strictly true, at least with respect to publishing. Amazon owns CreateSpace, which is a publisher. As such, it is in direct competition with other publishers, or soon will be.

CreateSpace is currently aimed at the indie/print-on-demand market (for example: https://www.createspace.com/47... [createspace.com]) but Amazon has expressed an interest in branching out into mainstream publication.

As such, it is positioned to dominate the publishing and distribution vertical completely, and people are worried about this, f

Amazon dropped my Kindle book listing today. I wasn't terribly shocked because I had read that they were trying to corner the e-book market, and that's how you do it. My e-book was Barnes & Noble publisher associated, so Amazon is flexing their muscles at more than the two publishers mentioned it appears to me.

Amazon doesn't sell e/books. They provide a service for reading e/books. In some countries e/books are even taxed as a service instead of a physical good, at a higher rate.

There is a push now to charge higher tax only for service-type e/books (DRM-ladden, restricted to device/user, not resellable) and lower tax for proper e/books (no DRM, at most a watermark, can be passed around). It would not only be fair, but also appropriately reflect what you are actually paying for.

Keep in mind that most anti-trust violations are only anti-trust violations if a company with real market power does them. It was an anti-trust issue for IBM to write the Operating System on it's first PC, but it wasn't an anti-trust issue when Apple/Commodore/Osborn/etc. all did the same damn thing. Later on Apple bundling Safari with Mac OS, but not including any other options by default; was legally fine. But in Europe Microsoft gets into a whole hell of a lot of trouble if it doesn't offer people the op

Of course the publisher complains they are middle men, trying to hide the fact of how little they whilst they get the bulk of the profits. It is pretty obvious Amazon wants to become the publisher, via this method it can further reduce the price of books and increase sales whilst also increasing profits simply by taking the publishers cut. All Amazon has to do is contract out printing of the books. So this is all corporate manoeuvring and putting pressure on the authors to skip their publishers and go dire

Thank God Apple's e-book "monopoly" was crushed! Now we don't have to worry about there being a single, monolithic, insane entity controlling the entire marketplace dictating terms with impunity to the publishers.....yeah...good thing...

You're comparing Apples and Crocodiles. Apple rigged prices with the collusion of the major publishers which is illegal.

I think you are confused. Do you work at the DOJ by any chance. The agency model removed control over pricing from the vendor and gave it to the publishers. That means that Apple had no control over pricing.

Amazon sells some books for less than cost and offsets that loss with other higher margin items from their massive selection. It that better than publishers making money selling books at Apple or elsewhere?

If a book is priced at 9.99 at Amazon and 12.99 everywhere else, how long will the "everywhere else" be in the business of selling books (When they don't have the higher margin items that Amazon does)?

I DON'T CARE. Their app on iOS sucks and I have no interest in any sort of kind. I don't live in the US so I don't have a "PRIME" account either. The US DOJ is making things more difficult for non-americans to access content.

Isn't this a classic case of a bad business move by a big business creating incentives for other firms to fill that market need? Am I missing something? Sure, it's not great for the publisher in question, but heck - there is going to be a lot of money made by whomever DOES sell JK Rowling's next book.

Amazon will sell you her book. It'll just take weeks and weeks to get to your House. That's what Hachette is complaining about. Amazon makes it really inconvenient to buy Hachette books, which Hachette's authors say is reducing their sales.

I suspect what's gonna happen is that Amazon will cave immediately to avoid further bad PR, which will mean the DoJ will conclude there's nothing to investigate.

There are a ton of online book vendors, and Amazon's online print sales are a small fraction of the print market.

This. Just about everyone, from governments to publishers to authors to readers, have bitched incessantly about Amazon since they started seriously selling books. I would think this move would make the entirety of Hatchette's vertical market thrilled that Amazon has effectively left their local ballgame.

But no - Instead, we see the reality of the situation. No one actually wants Amazon ou

Utterly control? There's more than one way to buy a book. Since when has (less that total) censorship resulted in fewer books sales? TFA should really be tagged "Streisand Effect", as I'd never heard of this book before.

Out of the goodness of Steve's heart (and he has a rich history of goodwill) he tried to help the poor publishers out?

Not sure why everyone is so confused about this.

It was not out of Apple's goodness. It was not even legal. What I am saying is that against a real monopolists, some rules against group actions should be abolished. Amazon is able to dictate terms and harm publishers without recourse because Apple (the only serious challenger against Amazon consuming the whole eBook market) was slapped down

There is a pretty tried and true method to handle monopolistic businesses: petitioning the government to start an anti-trust investigation and possibly taking the company to court. Just because one company is behaving badly does not mean others can become vigilantes and do whatever they please.

There is a pretty tried and true method to handle monopolistic businesses: petitioning the government to start an anti-trust investigation

Pretty hard when the government has it against you to begin with.

Ever hear of the concept of civil disobedience? Doing something technically unlawful in pursuit of the greater good is a time honored tradition, and companies that participate in same should be lauded, not attacked.

So would it also be ok if publishers colluded with cell phone stores to instead sell jailbroken iPhones that purchase and download the books directly from the publishers, bypassing Apple's app store? I mean, seems like a simple case of what you consider 'civil disobedience' to me.

So would it also be ok if publishers colluded with cell phone stores to instead sell jailbroken iPhones that purchase and download the books directly from the publishers,

Why not? Although your analogy breaks down badly because none of what you advocate is bypassing a monopoly the way Amazon's kindle has a monopoly on eBooks. The Android market sells plenty of apps too.

right up and until the point where you wield monopoly power. In this case, Amazon has hit that point. When you become the market, you have to be the market thus have open access. Sorry, that's the price of success.

There is no way I can go to a Barnes and Nobels to buy books. There aren't two in my city alone, and also their website. There also aren't other general purpose retailers who sell books and tons of other good like Amazon. We certainly don't have 5 Targets, 10 Walmarts, 3 Costcos (and associated websites) in town. There also aren't any local booksellers or anything. And of course you can't buy eBooks from anyone else, certainly not from Apple, who's market capitalization far exceeds Amazon's.

I think some geeks like the GP need to get out of their house more often.

Yeah, and? If the publisher is upset by high prices, they can cut the price they sell the books to Amazon before. If the book is taking a long time to ship, the customer can go to the local book store.

Oh, you're not going to tell me their local book store doesn't stock these books, are you?

right up and until the point where you wield monopoly power. In this case, Amazon has hit that point. When you become the market, you have to be the market thus have open access. Sorry, that's the price of success.

There's a difference between a monopoly where customers have no choice, and a dominant player where most customer's choose to go as a result of that dominant player's success. This is different than an ISP where people literally have no choice. This is different from Microsoft in 2001 where people perceived they had no choice. I doubt most people who buy books from Amazon think it's the only book-seller out there. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing one way or the other whether Amazon is evil, merely st

Along those same lines, it should be noted that the paperback edition of "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon" will not be out until October 7, 2014, so it's not too surprising it was shown as "unavailable." Actually, if you go to Amazon right now, it does list the paperback edition (http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Store-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon/dp/0593070461/) as available, but it looks like it's only from third-party sellers, who may have mixed up their hardcover and paperback listings. The h

I tend to trust a writer who's losing money becasue of this more than I trust either Amazon or their publisher. Particularly when the publisher apparently refused to give the writer the information they'd need to prove who's delaying the shipments.

Amazon is using tried and true business methods here to lower costs by strong arming the producers. As long as they aren't a monopoly (and they aren't unless B&N goes out of business) there is absolutely nothing illegal about what they are doing. In fact it might just lower prices for consumers at the expense of revenue for the publishers and I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

Consider their goal is lower prices overall I support their push to force publishers to lower book prices. eBook prices in particular are absurd, publishers took the opportunity to dramatically boost profit margins (I wouldn't be surprised if eBook pricing had boosted profits triple their dead tree version) and I love the idea of Amazon using their size and sales volume as a weapon to bring those prices back in line with dead tree versions. Publishers fuck the authors over just like the music and movie companies and they all deserve a healthy slap and dramatically reduced margins, selling a book shouldn't net more than 10% ROI IMO and should be closer to 3%.

I wouldn't be surprised if eBook pricing had boosted profits triple their dead tree version

I believe that's in the right ballpark. A typical ebook agreement seems to give publishers about 75% of the income from an ebook vs 25% to the author, and their ebook prices are often higher than paper book prices.

Frankly, I'm amused to see the number of people here talking about the poor, put-upon publishers, when those publishers are earning three times as much as the actual writer from an ebook sale. Couldn't poste

Frankly, I'm amused to see the number of people here talking about the poor, put-upon publishers, when those publishers are earning three times as much as the actual writer from an ebook sale. Couldn't posters spare a thought for those who actually wrote the book now and again?

They do;as do the publishers. It starts with the letter F and with the letter U.

It could pretty well be illegal in Europe. Many EU countries have laws banning this sort of tactics as the abuse of the "market power". If you have more than a certain percentage of the market, you are treated as a quasi-monopoly and restrictions apply. These laws are mostly targeted at various retail chains that have abusive terms in their supplier contracts, but it is only a matter of time before this gets applied to Amazon, Google and similar.

Yes, it's one of the fundamental distinctions between the capitalist US and the corporatist EU in anti-trust law. In the US, you are expected to show the business practice harms consumers; in the EU, you merely show it hurts the profits of existing businesses.

Thus, for example, fixing the price of books is an illegal conspiracy under US law, but mandated by law in Germany.

The US used to have such laws, having suffered from significant monopoly problems in the past. It may be illegal in Canada, but it's arguably illegal everywhere else. If you sell houses in Chatham, you can't refuse to sell a house built by Bill Green, nor refuse to sell a house to Chan Hin Poon, even if you think Bill is an idiot and you hate anyone Chinese (;-))

Yeah because Amazon is looking out for you: "Amazon, which is under immense pressure from Wall Street to improve its profit margins, is trying to get better terms on e-books out of Hachette, the smallest of the top five New York publishers, as well as Bonnier." Douche bag.

This is a shitty, monopolistic way to go about it, but amazon kind of have a point. eBooks, a product which has no per-unit cost often cost the same amount, or *slightly* less to purchase on Kindle.
If there's no physical cost to produce, then it's a shitty move to try getting the customer to pay the same for what is frankly an inferior product.

Amazon and net neutrality my ass. That was the day I decided to no longer do any business with Amazon. A bookstore and hosting service that engages in politically motivated censorship does not deserve my business, and the story posted here shows how far Amazon is willing to go.

âoeWhat we are seeing is a classic case of muscle-flexing,â said Andrew Rhomberg, founder of Jellybooks, an e-book discovery site. âoeKind of like Vladimir Putin mobilizing his troops along the Ukrainian border.â

The other opinion of that is that Crimea has the right to secede and receive help from Putin or anybody they please. Thank you for making it harder for me to listen to you objectively by dropping a political dispute into this.

it's almost like having a company with a virtual monopoly on online sales is a bad thing. But hey, you don't _have_ to shop at Amazon, right? Not yet anyway... And they certainly wouldn't use their massive size to undercut all competition while making razor thin profits that no mom and pop could possibly sustain. And besides... Americans don't shop only on price, right? Boy, there are so many good reasons not to regulate here I can't pick just one.

There is no need to burn the books when you can just remove them from the shelves. The great thing about ereaders too is that all you reading habits can be tracked and the distribution of ideas can also be limited.

I have not purchased from Amazon for many years, due to their anti-worker labor practices. Now, they have dropped the mask completely and have revealed themselves to be clearly anti-publisher (in an effort to enslave authors).

Wal-Mart style tactics on a National, state-borderless, scale. Please blacklist their domain, as I have.

Like many things in law, it probably comes down to intent. Refusing to carry a book critical of their CEO is likely protected in most cases, since they aren't a "common carrier" required to deliver any content a customer requests. Refusing to carry or demoting the books of a given publisher unless they get paid more is trickier, if they are found to be abusing their effective monopoly to force those concessions.

Of course, if they are found to be abusing a monopoly, the resulting settlement could include requirements that they carry all books from certain publishers, which could then lead to them carrying books like the one critical of Bezos against their will.

Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel, The Girls of August, coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition.

A page for the physical book came right up [amazon.com], when I searched for it;
stating unavailable with an option to e-mail me when it becomes available.

I think it's clear that what we have here is a MARKETING dispute.
For one reason or another; Amazon has decided to stop collecting pre-orders on some books.
Perhaps because the Publisher has not signed the proper contracts or made the proper agreements with Amazon, required for them to offer that publisher's books on a pre-order basis.

But if you read the article the meat of the dispute is that after you hit "buy" Amazon says the books won't be available for weeks, and wouldn't you like to buy from someone else? Hachette swears it's shipping orders to Amazon the same as it always did. Amazon swears Hachette isn't sending them books. And a bunch of authors swear their royalty checks are shrinking.

Even if the law says it is ok, they still have a worrying amount of power regarding which books get to see the light of day and which do not. The harder it is for customers to hear about, locate, and purchase your work, the fewer will do so. Outside niches with fan bases willing to put in that extra work and communities that do the heavy lifting for them, this kind of censorship could be enough to pick winners and losers not based off consumer demand, but Amazon"s politics.

By selling at cost, becoming dominant in the field, and forcing other players to negotiate steep discounts with you. Now when you sell at cost it's below everyone else's cost. Amazon does the first. That's pretty much the entire point of Amazon. They also do the second, and even have the muscle to force shippers to change their business practices. OTOH, pretty much any big online retailer tries to do the same damn thing.

When they stop being a hard-ball retail company that sticks up for it's customers, and b

By selling at cost, becoming dominant in the field, and forcing other players to negotiate steep discounts with you. Now when you sell at cost it's below everyone else's cost. Amazon does the first. That's pretty much the entire point of Amazon. They also do the second, and even have the muscle to force shippers to change their business practices. OTOH, pretty much any big online retailer tries to do the same damn thing.

So in this scenario, they become lowest cost seller of everything? And this is harmful to customers, how?

If they decide they're a "monopoly" and jack up their prices - what do you think happens in the realm of online retail?

Let me get to the point. I don't think an "effective monopoly" is remotely possible in online sales, absent government intervention.

Is Amazon going to buy out all the search engines so people can't find cheaper retailers? How can Amazon jack up their prices, earn "monopoly pr

You have a lot of very solid logic, backed by wonderful theory, that makes perfect sense. There is nothing at all wrong with any of the reasoning you used, or the facts upon which said reasoning is based.

That doesn't mean it's not BS. Like all theories a single data point that doesn't fit with the theory totally destroys it, no matter how tight the logic.

And this article is that fact. Consumers are hurt when they lose choices. Amazon took away the choice to have Hachette books delivered in a timely manner.

And this article is that fact. Consumers are hurt when they lose choices. Amazon took away the choice to have Hachette books delivered in a timely manner. Since nobody noticed for months your wonderful theory that online retail can't be monopolized was proven wrong.

Monopoly is not defined as "power to `hurt' customers" or "customer faces a reduced number of choices", so all the rest of your post is a red herring.

No "monopoly" is not defined that way, but monopoly power is. You in fact defined it that way an entire two posts ago:"So in this scenario, they become lowest cost seller of everything? And this is harmful to customers, how?"

We can engage in a 10th-grade level grammar debate over whether "Monopolized" only means "the act of being a monopoly," or it can also mean "having monopoly power," or you can respond to my post on reality with something besides theory.

Hachette books does not have an innate right to use Amazon to sell their wares. If they don't like the level of service provided by Amazon, Amazon can do NOTHING to stop Hachette from creating an online store for their readers and shipping books by their choice of USPS, UPS, or FedEx. They could even sell their readers ebooks and not deal with the logistics of killing trees and moving them around.

The rights of a monopolist are red herring.

You do not the right to force IBM to sell you a computer that can run several different operating systems. You do not have the right to force Microsoft to sell you a computer with a browser that can access non-MS-approved websites. But it happened.

Or if that's too much work for Hachette, there a myriad of other online retailers who will gladly work with them to sell their wares.

The very idea of "muscling" in the online realm is ridiculous. Amazon can take their ball and go home but they can't force anyone else to use their ball.

You are certainly technically correct. Amazon is not a monopoly. However, they are the 800-pound gorilla, and we've seen this script before.

Essentially their market power allows them to dictate price and the price they demand is well below what the publishers can sustain themselves (as they currently exist) at. This means that they cannot (and will not) give the same price to the competition. This happened with the independent and the chain bookstores as well, and it pretty much drove the vast majority of the independents out of business.

And no, as has been made pretty clear, the strong majority of customers won't look anywhere else besides Amazon. Being unavailable in Amazon is roughly equivalent to having Google search delist your website. Sure, you still exist, and a small number of die-hards have you in their bookmarks, but you're essentially a dead-man (site?) walking.

So, effectively for the publishers, Amazon *is* the only game in town, regardless of legal definitions, and Amazon is playing the Walmart game. This might work well for consumers, unless they're looking for a certain quality of goods, in which case, the practice is deeply worrisome.

If you are interested in lots of cheap self-published fan-fic, then the "Amazonization" of the book industry is not a problem. After all, Walmart serves a significant audience as well. However, if you are well-served by the *current* book market, where books aren't cheap, but you are willing to pay the publishers for quality control (and assume that most good authors would find gainful employment elsewhere if they're asked to write for near-free) , then yes, driving the publishers out of business is not a positive development.

Essentially their market power allows them to dictate price and the price they demand is well below what the publishers can sustain themselves (as they currently exist) at. This means that they cannot (and will not) give the same price to the competition. This happened with the independent and the chain bookstores as well, and it pretty much drove the vast majority of the independents out of business.

And no, as has been made pretty clear, the strong majority of customers won't look anywhere else besides Amazon. Being unavailable in Amazon is roughly equivalent to having Google search delist your website. Sure, you still exist, and a small number of die-hards have you in their bookmarks, but you're essentially a dead-man (site?) walking.

The publishers don't have a right to exist as they currently are. Book publishing has changed and their model built when book publishing had high upfront costs doesn't work so well in an age where you can toss an ebook on the internet for practically nothing.

And no, as has been made pretty clear, the strong majority of customers won't look anywhere else besides Amazon.

That's not a monopoly. Every single one of those customers have the ability to choose any other Internet retailer. It's as simple as typing a new address in the browser. What is Amazon going to do, hijack their computer with a script?

This is idiotic. The real costs of books have not changed significantly. Books ARE NOT widgets. There is no assembly line for books. What will happen, what already IS happening is you'll be able to buy books cheaply and the overwhelming majority of them will suck. That's already the case at Amazon. Thanks to their kindle business (which you can't filter out in searches at Amazon) you have to wade through steaming heaps of self-published dreck to find a good books.
If you cut the margins thin enough, the au

Well, I was actually clarifying a question from two posts above me - where the poster specifically said they didn't know enough to answer. I'm in the same boat on the general question actually.

In general, yes a book store gets to choose which books to sell - as does any other store. On the other hand, if the store is the only store in town and there's no easy way to leave town, well that's what the anti-trust laws were originally written for. Market position matters: If you have a small slice of the mark

Under anti-trust law market-leaders have a lot of responsibilities normal companies don't have. Which means your analogy to the local store is irrelevant. Local book stores don't have to deal with the Sherman Antitrust Act*.

If you're a company like Amazon, and your policy is to stock damn near everything, including no less then 19 books by Hitler, you're not supposed to use your market power to screw anyone. You can use your power to a certain extent, but you can't abuse it. And yes, I'm fully aware that abuse is a relative term. That's kinda the point. If it wasn't, then a company could hack it's way around the objective definition very easily.

Keep in mind that if anti-trust law did not exist nobody would be able to read Slashdot unless they used Windows and IE, and that nobody would even have a computer running an open source OS because IBM would just have slapped IBM-OS on the original PC and Linus would never have been able to buy a machine capable of running a kernel he wrote himself.

*Internet factoid of the day: this is not named after the Civil War General, but after his brother, who became a Senator in 1861. He started as a Congressman, and almost became Speaker, but South Carolina managed to block him right before seceding, so he moved to the Senate. At the time William Tecumseh Sherman was known mostly as being Senator Sherman's brother. The loser third Sherman brother was Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court.

In a way, this is a core question in library science regarding censorship: does failure to carry an item constitute silent censorship? In libraries, the effort is to carry quality representations of multiple sides of an issue, even one that you may personally disagree with. But in this case, considering the bajillions of books and other items that Amazon carries in its cavernous warehouses across the United States and the world, operated by low-paid drones, also assuming they carry many other titles by th

The middle man is the one who pays the author an advance, so he doesn't starve while working on his book full-time. The middle man also has dedicated marketing and fulfillment departments that do the same work for many authors, spreading time and costs.

Finally, the publisher spreads the risk around. If you are a self-published author and your first book does not sell well, you're out a lot of time and effort, may be bankrupt, and you may never write another book again. If you are with a publisher and you

An advance is an advance, and everyone starts out low. In any kind of art/literature related field, we're basically gambling. If you're a new author, we're going to start off with small bets.

And the GP claimed that somehow the author was going to live off that advance while writing their book full time. Which is only likely to happen for established non-fiction writers... certainly not for a new, starving fiction writer.

When a legit publisher advertises, it's to the book trade, the retailers, the distributors. This is something the self-published author cannot do very efficiently.

Yes, exactly. Self-published authors don't care about advertising to 'the book trade, the retailers, the distributors', because they can just upload a file and be on Amazon, B&N and most other distributors and online retailers with print and ebooks within a few days.

Stupid people should not post: "Amazon, which is under immense pressure from Wall Street to improve its profit margins, is trying to get better terms on e-books out of Hachette, the smallest of the top five New York publishers, as well as Bonnier. For several months, Amazon has been quietly discouraging the sales of Hachette’s physical books by several techniques — cutting the customer’s discount so the book approaches list price; taking weeks to ship the book; suggesting prospective cust